Game 1 at the Tank tonight. The city of San Jose doesn’t take kindly to people arriving late to an early 6pm start, so I hope the Red Wings plan it better than their Tuesday night arrival. Here’s the Dudes thoughts on the four conference semis. Chime in with your predictions as well.

Montreal (8) vs. Pittsburgh (4)
Doug: The buck has to stop somewhere and it would be mission impossible for the Canadiens to knock off both the Eastern Conference titans, right? Pittsburgh has the experience, talent and heart to overcome a little Jacques Martin mojo. Penguins in five.

Mike: Pittsburgh got a huge gift in the 6-8 seeds winning, and them not going to the Stanley Cup Finals for the third straight year would be a choke job on their part.  Pens in six, and it only goes that long because Josh Gorges PWNS.

Philadelphia (7) vs. Boston (6)
Doug: This series might have more grinding than a weekend with Wilt Chamberlin. It has the potential to be the most entertaining, if you like old school, blood and teeth cocktail hockey. I’ll be watching and as usual, Chris Pronger will still be standing at the end. Flyers in seven.

Mike: Marc Savard is back, and this emotional high will last until he skates through the middle with his head down (or up) and Pronger sticks him in the nuts.  Then cross-checks him in the head.  Then stomps on him.  Flyers in six.

Vancouver (3) vs. Chicago (2)
Doug: The dislike between these two teams is delicious. The Hawks were criticized in Round 1 for not playing with much heart, but they showed me a lot at the end of Game 5 when they refused to go down. I would love to pick Vancouver, but when have they ever made the Conf. Finals? Not since their Stanley Cup run in 1994 behind Bure and Linden. Hawks in six.

Mike: It’s disappointing to see Doug abandon his prescient observation that Chicago’s goaltending is a ticking time bomb.  I now take the reins of that bandwagon.  Canucks in seven.  Steve Bernier has 27 points in the series.

San Jose (1) vs. Detroit (5)
Doug: The path to glory has been determined and the Sharks are going to have to earn it. If ever there was a year for our boys to oust the mighty Wings, this is their best chance. We have the talent, depth and a goalie who knows he could be looking for a new team if he doesn’t make this happen. Daniel-san kicks Mr. Miyagi in the nuts. Sharks in six.

Mike: Past DOH guests Craig Custance (DOH 94) and Mark Purdy (DOH 88 and 51) have written about this series already.  It appears that both have picked the Wings to win, so now I’m questioning my decision to link to the them.  No matter.  As Custance said, this could change the reputation of the entire franchise.  This is the best team the Sharks have ever had in the playoffs, and you can’t say that for the Wings.  Sharks in seven.

Mike and Doug break down the last of the Avalanche series, and now look ahead to the new opponent, the hated/dreaded Detroit Red Wings.  The Dudes give first-round grades to all of the players, and pump themselves up with reasons why the Sharks will win the second round series.

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The Sharks win game 5 decidedly, and the Dudes finally revel in a great Sharks performance.  They talk about the breakthrough with Craig Anderson, who has looked great for the Sharks other than their dominant ‘second’ line, and how the rest of the Western Conference series might turn out.

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Last night, the prominent emotion I felt after Pavs scored was relief, and not elation.  The Sharks are seemingly back on track for the moment, tying the series, again putting up more scoring chances than the opposition, but this time they won.  I got the idea for today’s post by reading this, and to a lesser extent, tweeting this last night.  Marleau, for some reason, looks largely disinterested in this series, and outside of a couple of speedy drives to the net, has seemingly avoided the Flying Body Show that this series has been so far.  The difference in his play from Seto’s, for instance, could not be more stark.  Seto is hitting everything that moves, grinding it out, and Marleau is trying the shifty thing, neither taking nor issuing hits.  But judging a guy on how he ‘looks’ is awfully subjective, and prone to bias.  How can we judge their effectiveness?

One way is Corsi number.  This is a number that Randy Hahn and Drew Remenda talked about on the telecast many times, though they call it “shots directed at net”.  That is, shots + missed shots + blocked shots.  Corsi is merely that, but you also subtract the opponent’s number from yours.  At that point, you have something kind of a like a shot +/-.  The events are much more common than goals, so you have a much larger sample size and thus less variation.  Corsi (or Hardwick, which is the same as Corsi but doesn’t include blocked shots) can also be calculated for each individual player.  Here are the season numbers for San Jose.  I believe this is normalized for ice time, otherwise we wouldn’t have fractional numbers.  But as we can see, we have Boyle #1, and Marleau #2 (I don’t count Ferriero really).  Thanks to timeonice.com, let’s look at playoff numbers through four games (not normalized for ice time).

First thing to notice is that all of these numbers are positive, which is really remarkable.  That’s just another way of saying the Sharks have vastly out-chanced and out-shot the Avs in the series.  Also, we can see Marleau is currently 5th among forwards, and behind Kent Huskins, who was barely positive in the regular season.  Thornton and Heatley did not have good games 1 or 4 (and Heatley even missed game 3), and that accounts for their low numbers.  As one would expect, the numbers for the top line are all more or less in line for each of the games- low single digits for games 1 and 2, around 10 for game 3, and back down for game four.  The main reason why Marleau is above the other two is because of game 4, where he was +8, where Thornton was +1 and Heatley -1.  So my observation that Marleau was doing particularly bad was almost completely backwards.  Still, all in all, this chart confirms with hard numbers what we already thought- the top line is not performing.  Not even close.  If we can get those guys rolling, we can expect the Sharks to roll better too.

What a way to lose.  The Sharks, after possibly the most dominating performance of the entire season, lose after Dan Boyle puts the puck into his own net, on an angle a shooter couldn’t score from 99 times out of a100.  In the postgame, Boyle was obviously crushed, and possibly questioning the wisdom of agreeing to a trade to a team that is obviously cursed.  What’s next, the ghost of Shawn Cronin making Nabby-sized hole in the ice?

*Checking wikipedia...  Ok, Shawn Cronin is still alive.  So we can rest easy about that one.  But I do want Mr. Cronin to look both ways before crossing the street.

Podcast tonight.

In the meantime, let’s come up with a better tagline for the end of this video.  This one leaves me a bit cold…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDdWCQ03xCQ[/youtube]

It’s my fault. I take full responsibility for what happened at the Tank of Wednesday night and I’m prepared to make amends.

It was my playoff beard – or lack their of. I’m not a morning person, and in my haze on Wednesday AM and deprived of all caffeine, I shaved the beginnings of my fighting facial follicles – and the Sharks lost. Rest assured that this has been corrected and because of my two day old beard, the Sharks will win four games in a row and right the wrongs and heckles from Sharks haters that we as loyal fans have been subjected to the last 48 hours.

A few other thoughts before I wander to the Tank tonight:

It didn’t make me feel much better this morning to see Joe Thornton and Patrick Marleau both proclaim that tonight’s game is not considered a “must win” in their minds. Really guys? I guess we shouldn’t expect anything else from them, but I certainly hope they play with a different intensity than that quote. If not, we’ll all be pointing to those comments as the slogan for why this team fails in April.

I’m not sure what Todd McLellan doesn’t see in Jamie McGinn but he played the fewest minutes of any player on both teams in Game 1. Based on reports from practice yesterday, it appears that Ortmeyer will be in for Game 2. Does that mean we’ll see two guys glued to the pine in the 3rd period? I thought this roster was deeper than last years, but the lack of love for his 4th liners is a consistent theme from McLellan this time of year.

If the Sharks have any hope of advancing, they need to make a statement tonight. There have been lots of Game 1 upsets this week and as Bill Shakespeare once said, “One game does not a series maketh, Hamlet”, but another bomb on home ice won’t have this team feeling lots of love from their home fans as they leave the Tank and head to enemy territory.

Respect the Superstition. Grow Beard Grow.

Only hours away before puckdrop, and in visiting my usual blog suspects this morning, I got a little more interested in the goaltending matchup.  On the podcast (scroll down) David said that Anderson needs to have a near-perfect series in order to win, and I guess I might have mistakenly took this to mean that the Sharks have a goaltending advantage.  Gabe Desjardins disagrees, to put it mildly:

Is there any aspect of the game where Colorado’s better than San Jose?  Just one: goaltending.  Craig Anderson is a vastly better goaltender than Evgeni Nabokov, even if Nabokov has somehow managed to put up respectable numbers this season.

I asked him about it a bit in the comments saying I’d put them about even, and his reply was:

Since the lockout: Craig Anderson save percentage = .916; Nabokov = .910. Nabby sucked for four seasons; he didn’t become good this year.

Interesting.  I wouldn’t make the claim that Nabby is an elite goaltender, and reading the great Brodeur Is a Fraud blog where the argument is made that SV% isn’t the perfect stat, but it’s a hell of a lot better than all the others, seems to back this up.  However, Nabby does have a better SV% this year than Anderson – .921 to .916.  Also, after reading this and this from Jonathan Willis, we see that Nabby and Anderson are above average in consistency, with SV% standard deviations of 0.064 and 0.054, respectively.  Those are new numbers I calculated based on their stats from the entire regular season.  We did see Nabby regress a bit in save percentage, as Gabe pointed out, but stayed relatively consistent.

Also, since Nabby ‘sucked’ the last four years, I wanted to find out the difference between sucking and not.  So let’s look at last year, where Nabby’s SV% was 0.910, good for 27th in the league.  Certainly not great, not even good.  If Nabby faced the exact same number of shots, and ended up with a 0.921 SV%, a tick better than Bobby Lou and good for 4th in the league, I think we could call that a great (or even elite) performance.  So what was the difference between Nabby’s and Luongo’s performances?

That’s seventeen goals over the course of the season, equivalent to around 4 or 5 wins.  Another way to put it , since Nabby only played 62 games, that’s one goal every 3.6 outings.  To me, that doesn’t sound like a lot.  It really shows that the difference between an average or below-average goalie and an excellent goalie is very small- just one fewer shot facing a late lateral push, an open 5-hole or a sluggish glove.  If Nabokov didn’t do that once every 216 minutes of playing time he would have been a top-5 goalie in the NHL last year, versus a top-30.

Oh yeah, GO SHARKS.

After a nail-biting good time yesterday watching the three games on tap at noon Pacific time, the Sharks finally caught a break.  It didn’t always look good.  The Avs were up 1-0, which was the be-all end all: if the Avs won in regulation, there was no chance the Sharks played the Wings. But the Avs coughed up a goal with 4 minutes left, and I was a little peeved, to put it lightly.  I would have thrown a snow blower at Joe Sakic at that moment if I could have.  And when the Hawks tied Detroit and then went on the power play with less then two minutes left, I had an instant feeling of dread.  And although we were all collectively forced to root for our sworn enemies, the Red Wings, they managed to kill the penalty and go on to win in overtime.

Which gives us the Avs, of course.  We are trying to line up an Avs voice for the podcast tomorrow, but either way, you’ll have the mp3 in your grubby little hands on Wednesday morning.  Some good listening before the Sharks’ playoff start.  Could this be the easiest draw in Sharks playoff history?  Could the Sharks possibly sweep, like my co-host Chetan thought on the radio show last night?  Or will those plucky Avs give the Sharks a good run, and Scott Hannan will be the making of nightmares?  Predictions in the comments, please.

This comes from an email we got for the podcast (make sure to listen, we actually have a guy with credibility this week), asking essentially, “Does the Sharks losing streak (or later, the winning streak) help or hurt the Sharks’ playoff chances?  Does success in the last 10 or 20 games result in deep playoff runs?”

This is an important question, and let me be perfectly honest- Gabe Desjardins’ recent post on something similar is probably a lot better than this one is going to be.  So I’d read this first with a sense of charity, then click over to Behind the Net and read the real stuff.  To defend myself, I was planning this post since a week ago, so I’m not copying Gabe- I swear.

To answer this question, I compiled the record of the last 10 and 20 games of every playoff team since 2001.  This gives us 112 teams, which isn’t a giant sample size, but it should smooth over some rough edges.  I correlated this (Pearson product-moment if you must know) against the round where they eventually lost (or not), but then I decided to copy Gabe just a little and use playoff wins instead, because that gives us more granularity than just rounds achieved- we get 16 gradations instead of 5.

Here’s the chart.  I’ll explain in a minute.

blah blah blah math

Ok, so this is what’s called an XY scatter plot, with the number of points in the last n games (red dots are last 10 games, blue dots are last 20) versus how deep that team went in the playoffs.  0 wins is swept in the first round, 16 is the Stanley Cup Champions.  If there were a strong correlation, we would see something of a line going from the lower left to upper right in each color.  That is, the teams that do poorly in the last bit of the season also bow out early.  Or we might see something completely counter-intuitive-  a negative correlation, in a line that goes from the upper left to bottom right.  That would signal that teams that do well in the final stretch “peak too early” and are more likely to bow out in the first few rounds.

We have what we call in the mathematics world, a “mess”.

Of course there’s going to be some variance, and the graph would be more like a cloud than a line, but here we just have a plate of spaghetti.  If you want numbers, the correlation for the last 20 games points and playoff wins is 0.12, and the last 10 wins 0.08.  Correlation ranges from -1 (late points always means bowing out early) to +1 (late points means going deep in the postseason).  0.12 is slightly positive- it’s probably a tiny bit helpful to do well late in the season- but it’s certainly nothing predictive.  It’s essentially a crapshoot- performing worse (or better) doesn’t mean much.  Let’s look at some extremes:

• The team with the most points in the last 20 games among all teams I looked at is the 2006 Red Wings, who only lost one game in regulation in the last 20.  That team lost in the first round to Edmonton.
• That very same year, the Carolina Hurricanes scored only 21 points in the last 20, barely .500.  That’s the second worst record of any of the playoff teams that year (only the #8 New York Islanders were worse).  For those that remember, the Canes won the Cup.
• Last year, the team that had the best late record of all playoff teams, the Pittsburgh Penguins, won the Cup.  They played the Wings (again) in the Finals, who had 12 fewer points in the same number of games, good for 13th amongst playoff teams.

Does anything correlate better to playoff success?  The answer is yes.  The overall 82-game record correlates better: 0.32.  And even better is the correlation of seeding to playoff wins: -0.37 (negative because a lower number (seed) correlates to a higher number (playoff wins)).  This does tell us something interesting- it’s better to be lucky than good.  It’s better to luck into a higher seed with a worse record (in a weak division) than score a ton of standings points and only get the #4 or #5 seed.  With the Sharks guaranteed the #1 or #2, they are in the best possible position.  Now the question is, can they transform this advantage, however slight, into real playoff happiness?

We’re going to find out.  I’m nervous.

Craig Custance, the NHL writer from the Sporting News (and new podcaster) joins the Dudes in starting the playoff coverage.  He talks about the top prospects, and the Sharks prospects in the soon-to-be playoffs.  Mike and Doug then continue those points in reading listener emails.

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